Today I'm delighted to welcome
JULIA DAHL
to share her BEST OF CRIME ...
... AUTHORS
It feels impossible to pick a favorite among so many, but I suppose if I had to take the books of just one crime author to a deserted island it would probably be Patricia Highsmith. She is an absolute master of menace. The sun is shining in paradise, everyone dresses for dinner, but the ugliness beneath the surface casts a pall over everything.
... FILMS/MOVIES
My lifelong love affair with the Coen Brothers began in 1996 with Fargo. It’s a wickedly funny, twisted drama about a kidnapping gone wrong in the frozen tundra of America’s upper Midwest. Joel and Ethan Coen have an uncanny ability to inhabit and illuminate subcultures that has you rooting for everyone, even the most depraved career criminal.
... TV DRAMAS
Soon after I moved to New York the HBO series Six Feet Under premiered. It’s the story of a family in Los Angeles that runs a funeral home and at the beginning of each episode, we watch someone (whom the family will later bury) die. It wasn’t a crime show, per se, but death was an integral part of the fabric of the character’s lives. That darkness permeated their psyches and affected them in endlessly fascinating ways.
... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES
Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote. I started watching this television show as a pre-teen and decided my life goal was to be Jessica: a crime novelist/amateur sleuth. I haven’t solved any murders yet, but maybe it’s just a matter of time. Jessica (otherwise known by her nom de plume, J.B. Fletcher) was a feminist hero. She was a widow with a booming career (an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Maine? Unheard of!), a generous heart, and a spot-on bullshit detector. The first gift my husband gave me when we started dating was a book in the Murder, She Wrote series – I knew I’d found “the one.”
... DEATH SCENE
I have to go back to Fargo for this, too. At the end of the film, the character played by Steve Buscemi meets his end…inside a wood chipper.
... BLOGS/WEBSITES
Local newspapers are where I go to learn about contemporary crime. These days, there are around 17,000 homicides in the U.S. each year, and much as I love the New York Times, the paper of record doesn’t cover more than a handful. If you want to know who is killing who and how justice is – or isn’t – meted out, you need to read the Fresno Bee, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Arizona Sun.
... WRITING TIPS
I’ve read that there are two kinds of writers: those who plan, and those who run to the end. I am the latter. I want to get the skeleton of the book as fast as I can so that I have a solid structure to work with. If I’m writing a scene that I know needs details I don’t have at the moment, I use the journalistic notation “TK” (meaning, to come) and skip ahead. Getting caught up on small things can slow your progress.
About JULIA DAHL
Julia Dahl is the author of three novels about a New York City crime reporter: INVISIBLE CITY, RUN YOU DOWN, and CONVICTION. After 20 years as a reporter and editor, she now teaches journalism at NYU.
Find Julia Dahl on Twitter - @juliadahl
About RUN YOU DOWN
Publisher's description
Aviva Kagan was just a teenager when she left her Hasidic Jewish life in Brooklyn for a fling with a smiling college boy from Florida. A few months later she was pregnant, engaged to be married and trapped in a life she never imagined. So, shortly after the birth of her daughter she disappeared.
Twenty-three years later, the child she walked away from, NYC tabloid reporter Rebekah Roberts, wants nothing to do with her. But when a man from the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Roseville, NY contacts Rebekah about his young wife’s mysterious death, she is drawn into Aviva’s old world, and a hidden culture full of dangerous secrets and frustrations.
Run You Down was published in paperback by Faber & Faber on 1 January 2019
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